Vurës Language

Vurës (Vureas, Vures) is an Oceanic language spoken in the southern area of Vanua Lava Island, in the Banks Islands of northern Vanuatu, by about 2000 speakers.

Vurës was described by linguist Catriona Malau, in the form of a grammar and a dictionary.

Name

The name ''Vurës'' is named after the bay located in southwestern Vanua Lava in the language itself. In Mota, the bay is referred to as ''Vureas'' . These come from a reconstructed Proto-Torres-Banks form *''βureas(i,u)''.

Dialectology

Vurës shows enough similarities with the neighbouring language Mwesen that the two have sometimes been considered dialects of a single language, sometimes called ''Mosina'' (after the name of Mwesen village in the language Mota). And indeed, a 2018 glottometric study has calculated that Vurës and Mwesen share 85% of their historical innovations, revealing a long history of shared development between these two lects. Kalyan & François 2018.

However, studies have shown that Mwesen and Vurës have various dissimilarities, e.g. in their vowel systems, in their noun articles, in their pronoun paradigms — enough to be considered clearly distinct.

Phonology

Consonants

* is also heard as a tap in free variation.
* A glottal stop only rarely occurs in some words.
* is heard as before a voiceless stop.
* is heard as when preceding another consonant.
* Stop sounds are aspirated before vowels.

Vowels

Vurës has 9 phonemic vowels. These are all short monophthongs :

* is only a marginal sound that occurs in a small amount of words, mostly borrowings.
* The vowel inventory also includes a diphthong .

References

Citations

Bibliography

*
*
*
*
*
* .
*
*
* .

External links

''Vurës—English dictionary''
by Catriona Malau.

Audio recordings in the Vurës language
in open access, by A. François (''Pangloss Collection'', CNRS).

Banks–Torres languages
Languages of Vanuatu

{{SOceanic-lang-stub